Review: In ‘The Improbability of Love’ by Hannah Rothschild, an Art-World Caper

“The Improbability of Love” is the name of both Hannah Rothschild’s debut novel and the masterpiece at its heart. The painting in question is fictional; the painter, Jean-Antoine Watteau, is not.

Watteau is credited with the creation of the 18th-century fête galante painting style, defined primarily by costumed figures flirting and cavorting in parklands. Ms. Rothschild’s book, though set in contemporary London, is done in more or less the same idiom — it’s a frolicsome art-world caper whose extravagant personalities tear boisterously through manicured worlds (without realizing that dark clouds are accumulating in the distance, just as they do in some of Watteau’s works).

The book may on occasion be silly and over-the-top, even for a satire. But Ms. Rothschild writes with such exuberance and spins such a propulsive yarn that you happily accept these excesses as part of the package, the same way you happily accept the frippery of Elton John.

Assuming you like Elton John.

(I like Elton John.)

The plot. Lord, where to begin. Annie McDee, a struggling chef, is 31 and reeling from a catastrophic break-up. She buys a painting at a junk shop for a fellow she met at a speed-dating wingding; he stands her up for dinner. Annie now looks at this painting as a jeering reminder of her impetuosity, but Evie, Annie’s mother and unwanted houseguest (lush, goes through boyfriends like popcorn), sees something of value in it, stuffs it into a plastic bag, and forces her daughter into an excursion to the Wallace Collection.

There, as her mother brazenly compares and contrasts the painting to Rococo masterpieces on the walls, Annie meets an adorable guide and struggling artist, Jesse. He offers to help determine the painter and provenance of Annie’s mysterious purchase — as a pretext for courtship, of course.

Poor lambs. They have no idea what lies ahead. This lost work is in fact a foundational piece in Watteau’s oeuvre, one that’s had pride of place in almost every palace listed in Baedeker’s and is currently of keen (and inconvenient) interest to Winkleman Fine Art Ltd., where Annie works as a lowly chef.

The reader suddenly enters London’s outrageous art scene, whose gallery of divas and miscreants includes a Russian billionaire thug named Vlad; an American dowager socialite named Melanie Appledore; and most deliciously, a 69-year-old gay Svengali and fixer named Barthomley Chesterfield Fitzroy St. George, né Reg Dunn, who never met a wig or paparazzo he didn’t like. A typical exchange between Barty and one of his assistants:

“Dmitri Voldakov wants to know if you can organize a chalet in Gstaad that sleeps 30?”

“Tell him of course — even if I have to build it with my bare hands.”

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Hannah RothschildCreditHarry Cory Wright

You grow so accustomed to these ridiculous — and for the most part, lovable — characters that it doesn’t seem at all strange when a luckless earl throws himself at the mercy of a contemporary artist named Blob.

It helps that Ms. Rothschild, a descendant of the wealthy banking family, knows a great deal about art. (She’s made several documentaries about painters and recently became the first female chair of the National Gallery in London.) Her erudition — about restoration, authentication, art history in general — comes through on page after page, and it’s one of the incidental pleasures of reading “The Improbability of Love,” as are her mouthwatering descriptions of the feasts Annie makes.

Some of the best disquisitions about art come from the painting itself, which, yes, is a character, and a very refined one at that. “His beauties,” says the painting of its master, Watteau, “had a sort of désinvolture (get a dictionary).”

This is probably the time to note that the painting’s first language was “pre-revolutionary French.”

The Watteau’s hauteur is justified. It possesses magical, almost aphrodisiacal, powers. Practically every man who has ever seen this masterwork has felt instantly compelled to give it to his beloved. “I was painted to celebrate the wild cascades of love,” explains the painting, “the rollicking, bucking, breaking and transformative passion that inevitably gave way to miserable, constricting, overbearing disappointment.”

I circled that sentence as I was reading, thinking it a nice distillation of both love’s folly and the mood of the fantastical Watteau. Unfortunately, Ms. Rothschild must have liked that sentence, too, because it shows up again, almost word for word, 50 pages later.

While we’re on the subject of textual glitches: Jesse, the struggling artist, has “tawny-colored eyes” when he and Annie first meet cute on Page 63; “deep-set green eyes” on Page 120; and “summer-blue eyes with dark edging” on Page 168. The blue eyes finally stick. “His deep-blue eyes,” she writes again on Page 296, “were flecked with tiny gold and black streaks.”

I chalked up these inconsistencies to the author’s obvious enthusiasm. I suspect that Ms. Rothschild, after decades of contemplating art, is also in the habit of describing people in painterly detail. (Watery eyes, high cheekbones, smatterings of freckles, curls of hair — they all get top billing in her character sketches.) But as the painting might say: The state of publishing these days! Would such copy-editing mistakes have happened in a Thomas Wolfe novel edited by Maxwell Perkins? Non.

There’s not much more I can say about the intrigue of “The Improbability of Love” without being a rotten spoiler. What I can say is that Ms. Rothschild makes an impassioned case for art — as a companion to the lonely, as a restorative to those in pain — and leaves us with the unambiguous impression that it speaks with equal power to angels and demons. One character muses that “there were paintings to suit every predicament. No emotion, however base or delicate, had been considered too petty or panoramic.” Beauty inspires both passion and violence; in “The Improbability of Love,” you get a generous helping of both.